How Yoga Has Trained me to Distress

Recently I faced a challenging moment in life because I had to have an extremely difficult conversation with a person I love. It’s that conversation you can’t avoid at all and you wish you were somewhere else but there. I was feeling so vulnerable and trapped. In, fact I felt as if I would hurt both or either of us.

I took a deep breath while creating space for the unknown. Suddenly it hit me: I could take such deep breaths because of yoga and I could also sit with myself and analyze any situation before I could react. Yoga had surely taught me to be a good friend to myself and to others.

Can five or more breaths in any yoga pose assist me to tackle a difficult situation? Well, every time I think of yoga I think of a relaxing practice that leaves me better than it found me. Does that happen to you too? If it does, then the answer is yes!

Yoga works long-term and the main reason behind it is that it has been designed to trigger the responses we have during a stressful moment. Let’s take a simple example; holding crazy poses in for a considerable duration while the legs are burning isn’t so easy. Sometimes you will feel like letting go or you might start to curse your instructor from inside. That’s stressful.

The main reason yoga works is because during this stressful circumstances, something else always happens. This is the time you are working your body and mind to relax, despite the situation. You are reorienting that stress response from the usual heavy and fast breathing, tense muscles and having panicked thoughts to a slow breathing and calmer thoughts. You also modulate the physical reaction by training the mental reactions. Thus you can lower your blood pressure, secondary concern and ease on the breathing.

We all have that magical yoga moment while in class when all the body or emotional stress drops away. The good news is that if anyone can manage to consciously cultivate this kind of balance while physically stressed, then it’s possible to strike the balance when under mental and emotional stress.

Yoga can teach you to train your stress response systems. This is one thing many individuals never learn their entire life since they never get the chance to develop the needed tools. The moment you do yoga, you become proactive especially if you were stuck. This helps you to know how to release any kind of stress when on or out of the mat.

When faced with an emotional situation, I usually step out of my reactive self just like I do when my instructor asks me to hold a pose that I find impossible. Rather than telling them NO or becoming angry, I have learned how to cultivate peaceful responses.

Now you know how I handle myself. I believe the only way to find this truth is by improving on your practice and staying true to yourself and your body. Each practice takes you a step closer to these goals and even more!